This Tuesday marks our second Hack Night as a Code for America brigade, and we’re hitting the ground running! The second National Day of Civic Hacking is happening at the end of the month, and Portland has no less than two events in the works to celebrate the occasion.
Hacking Urban Development with Intel
The first event is being put together by Intel and Zidell Yards as part of Intel’s Code for Good program, and will be focusing on community-driven urban planning and development of the growing South Waterfront district. They are running a two day hackathon and offering awards to the best project in each of the event’s categories.
Building Lasting Services with Code for Portland
The second event is being put together by our group with sponsorship from Esri, Fine Design Group, Epicodus, and North, and is focusing on using technology and open data to build useful and sustainable services for the citizens of Portland and beyond. We’re planning on having a full day of hacking on Saturday and presentations on Sunday at North on 1515 NW 19th Ave, and an after party over at Zidell Yards on Sunday afternoon to connect with the folks from the other event and trade stories.
In the spirit of collaboration, the two hackathons are having a kickoff party together on Friday, May 30th at Epicodus. There will be beer and food! Minors are also welcome.
We’re inviting people to come to tomorrow’s Hack Night to hear some guest speakers talk about projects. We’ll be talking about projects from local non-profits dealing with civic engagement, voter education, campaign finance data, and environmental impact in need of help, and we’ll have some guests from Code for America and Portland Metro talking about an open trail data project.
We’re also encouraging people to propose their own ideas and bring in worthy projects they think might benefit from the exposure. After that we’ll be breaking into groups based on interest and planning what to work on during the hackathon at the end of the month.
Thinking Beyond Hackathons
We think Portland is the perfect city to lead the effort to build distributed, community-maintained open source systems on top of open data and be a leader in the world of civic hacking. As a city, we’ve already done a lot of trailblazing in this area, but there’s plenty more work to do and people to help.
We’re hoping you’re as excited as we are to build good things that last and to see what we can do to make our city even more awesome than it already is.
Come to tomorrow’s hack night! Help us plan, pitch an idea, join a project!
Event Details
- Time: Tuesday, May 20th, 6:30 to 9:30 PM
- Location: Esri Portland R&D Center
- Please RSVP so we can make sure to have enough pizza!
Related
- Check out this Tech Crunch article from last year to find out more about the history of the National Day of Civic Hacking.
- There is no National Day of Civic Hacking page on wikipedia. Perhaps another project? :)